News and information for Polish Writers and Writers of the Polish Diaspora

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Sharon Mesmer: Poet Laureate of Brooklyn?

Polish-American poet Sharon Mesmer is being considered for the position of Poet Laureate of the largest borough in New York. You can read all about it and see one of her poems about Brooklyn in The Brooklyn Paper.

Here are a couple of Sharon's poems that appeared in the special issue of Kritya dedicated to Polish-American and Polish Diaspora writing that I co-edited with Christina Pacosz.Blue-Collar Typeface

From the colophon to Aaron Simon’s Carrier, Insurance Editions, 2006:

“Gotham 2003: This plain yet quintessential font was designed by Tobias Frere- Jones and is based on vernacular architectural lettering found throughout New York City. It is a blue-collar typeface that is both utilitarian and perfectly simple.”

Some people would like to be blue-collarwithout actually having been born blue-collar.While you,who were born blue-collar,wish you could afford something more than the Wendy’s salad bar.

Some people who are proud of how blue-collar they think they arespeak roughly to waiters,never look them in the eye,and refuse to pay to get into poetry readings,while afterwardsthey’re back homeputting their Manhattan co-op on the marketso they can buy a house on the outskirts of Paris.Some of these people are your friends.They will surprise you.Because someday you will discoverthat all that time they seemed so interested in what you had to say about yourblue-collar upbringing,they never found actual blue-collar peopleall that interesting.

Because a blue-collar person can’t recommend them to an editoror get them into an MFA programor set them up with a teaching job.Blue-collar people often don’t care aboutacademic poetry,the breaking of the line,and they may not necessarily give a shit about anythingNoam Chomsky ever said.But that doesn’t mean that blue-collar people are“utilitarian” or “perfectly simple.”I know lots of useless, imperfectly complicatedblue-collar people.And their line breakskick your line breaks’s ass.Summer, Elizabeth Street

Into a green-gold tumbler of lightalong the side of the churchwe surged,a scourge upon the fading strainsof the Litany to Our Lady.Tossing red beaniesinto prairie air,we ran with eyes closed,past RoJo's,Patka funeral home,and the ochre two-flat where the Rybicki family lived,its color a refract of noon suninto Mexico.All colors angled out that dayinto a low-grade version of eternitythat would span three green monthsand end in a Ramblerin the parking lot of a department storeacross from the little airportthe day before Labor Day.

And in the evenings,there was nothing on TV(this was before "The Partridge Family").And so summer —that one summer —was swallowedby the cool of the Sherman Park tavern before noon,the bra models in the Sears catalogue,and the girls from "Scooby-Doo."

____________

Sharon Mesmer is a Fulbright Senior Specialist candidate and recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowships. The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose) and Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books) were published in 2008. Her blog is available online and elsewhere.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).